Category: Dream

Finally, the Sci-Fi dream of two nights ago. As promised here, the tried topic for lucid dreaming was about the wild ways we could possibly encounter aliens.

Here’s the outcome, to be drafted in linear terms, in three eposides:

* * *
Finally, the promissed Sci-Fi dream of two nights ago. The tried topic for lucid dreaming was about the wild ways we could possibly encounter aliens.

Here’s the outcome, to be drafted in linear terms, in three eposides:

* * *

Episode one, Ancient Intelligence: 👽

There were aliens long before us. They were very intelligent. Too intelligent for their own good, like us, but even more. They were like what we could be in a thousand years, however still not immune from the existential threats caused by their own progress.

Their expeditions kept imposing frequent threats upon their safety, and their knowledge could only marginally solve them. Plus they had used up their planet, so they wanted to go for the stars. For that they had also started to spread seeds of life in to the vast darkness of the galaxy, hoping that one day one of them hits a livable planet and contaminate it with life.

This charitable cosmic initiative was still a humble investment by our ancient grandparents: First it would take billions of years for those life forms to create a discent biosphere. Then once any of these life forms could reach an intelligent level, it would not be immuned from a self-distruction that seems to be the natural course of evolution. Because of such prognosis they were working to make better plans and manifacture more resilient seeds of life.

* * *

Episode two, Edible Knowledge: 💊📕

These aliens survived long enough to know how to hack life. Their bodies were customizable and could transform, their age and faith and habits were out of their own choice and above all they had this organic technology that allowed them to learn new knowledge by eating stuff; a library for a spoon of whatever knowledge they wanted to learn and store!

Among those edible flash memories, there were even more flexible variations compatible with some other potential life forms that could have evolved out of those pollinating seeds. And the aliens wanted to preserve their legacy and save their civilization, but if not that, they new they can stand a chance to save their future descendent life forms from doing similar mistakes.

* * *

Episode three, ticking bombs: 💣☄

Fast forward… Their civilization was long gone. But in a cold corner of their solar system, in danger of solar flares and cosmic hazards, there were these space stations rotating silently with thousands of ticking bombs in them. They would go off once in a million years according to the plan to hopefully end up landing on a now-matured life form to give them the edible wisdom of survival, showed long ago to successfully transfer the knowledge to most imaginable life forms of this family, lab-tested and scientifically proven!

May be this time we could survive and go interstellar…

* * *

PS. This was obviously influenced by Terence’s Food of the Gods and any originality must go to his machine elves and their ecology of souls. 🍄 What was new to me was the third episode, especially the sad punchline that reminded me of the detached scene of Gravity. There was no scenes of dildosphere!!

Aliens probably exist. But they didn’t make our pyramids. And they didn’t negotiate with our governments. That’s just a childish scenario.

It’s reasonable to believe in extraterrestials. They are likely to exist, given the vastness of the universe, and given us. So we are probably not alone, but our companions are perhaps not so hangable either.

Aliens, at the time of us encountering them, could be inconceivably different from us. In their size and time constants, intelligence, capabilities, goals and morals. So the cosmic pluralism that makes us unlikely to be alone, makes us even less likely to have friends.

The most realistic scenarios of us and aliens encountering each other has got to be the wildest ones. Not like we both go to space and we then meet and exchange ideas. Or they come find our planet and throw a pyramid at it and leave, then millenia later return with fancier UFOs to negotiate with our government.

We have probably not met aliens yet, not conventionally, recently, and in equal terms at least. And they have probably not encountered us. But if they already have, it must have been a long time ago, and perhaps in ways less imaginable to our day to day minds.

So this was a preperation for what I am going to dream about tonight. In what ways we may have encountered aliens! There may be episodes or scenes of dildosphere too. Will let you know how it goes.

I was visiting a botanical garden exhibiting “cousins of life on earth” curated from other planets. Although the items on the show were quite exotic, they still seemed familiar to our life forms, so I was a bit dissapointed by them being not extraterrestial enough.

There were a lot of exotic plants and a whole department of huge carnivorous ones. Many of them slooked like human eye with their spikes being like eyelashes.

I was arguing that their look is not just like general eyes actually resembles our very human-specific eyes, with very similar eyelashes and same sharp angles. Therefore they must have evolved after modern humans and are very recent.

Meanwhile I was trying to walk between the plants to avoid the phosphorous dust they were spreading, since their shiny pollination dust was dangerous radioactive material for us.

All of a sudden it turned out that the whole department we are walking on is a huge carnivarous plant like a typical flytrap and its snaps are coming together to eat us all alive probably faster than we can escacpe it.

I ran away and woke up to our boring terrestrial life forms.

PS. The voice in my dream, few nights earlier:

There’s a closet full of strange creatures in the back of everyone’s mind. Once you know in which direction to turn your head, you will be amazed by seeing them all. But even more surprised how in the universe had you not done that simple twist of the neck before.

Just woke up from this sweet dream that I was watching a movie about rural England in late 18th century featuring an old woman called Mrs. LaZouche who was taking care of some kids in an orphanage, a foster home or a kindergarden.

They were very happy and living in a green summer place with a bridge between a wooden castle and forests. I thought it is a collective community with an interesting social structure. So I asked to join them in the movie and my excuse to do it was through applying for a job!

Mrs. LaZouche said since we are in the movie and you are watching it we can only have “tea time” together. In one of the tea times I was prepared to get in there but realized that we have conflict of interests, since she wants to come to our world and I want to go to theirs, and I was feeling bad to reject her to come out of the movie.

Afterall I ended up there somehow, together with a smart kid boy from our digital age. We two started an adventure there. It turned out that I don’t have to be worried about him, since he was loved by Mrs. LaZouche and was integrating faster than me with the environment and was immediately accepted by his age group. He knew by instinct where the bridge goes and what things in the scenery are for. He was also oversmarting the non-technological kids, but they were very humble and had gathered around him, mostly little girls, treating him like a star. Meanwhile I was checking the environment and how they live.

The next day black and white newspapers published his picture with some funny news about a kid from the future. He had tied up a little girl using a spider gun that was shooting ropes and then had taken selfies with her.

His entitlement was kind of cute and harmless, and quite accepted by the inhabitants of the movie. The antique photographer was laughing with me that when he wanted to untie the little girl the boy wanted to shoot him too, but his spider gun was out of water! I was using situational clues to stay socially relevant in their environment. Like I was not mentioned in the news and humbly laughed about it with their journalists. I was joking with their grown-ups and also commented Mrs. Lazouche on her nice and old style dress.

I very rarely watch movies or series; only about a handful of times during the past decade. As an ex- movie geek I lost this modern-day habit a decade ago, and it never came back.

Last month I finally watched the movie Matrix! I was surprised by the similarity of some of its scenes to my recurring dreams about simulated reality that I had prior to watching the movie, or any other similar motion picture for that matter.

My time of having dreams about simulations, precede watching Matrix and Avatar, as well as the newer series Black Mirror. During those couple of months, I was steering my lucid dreams to fantasize about the possibility of us all being inside some form of simulation. Every other night there was a new story cast behind my eyelids. I wrote down and posted some of them.

I got super excited about these visuals, and I communicated them passionately to the world. Little did I know that people had already masterfully depicted such fantasies in blockbuster movies. The dream imagery, that I appreciated and presented as novel, might have felt like old news to you.

Was everyone out there aware of this movie genre of simulated reality, except for me, the one person most expressly obsessed about it?

* * *

Anyhow, the similarity between my fantasies and some of those movies’ visual effects is strange. Why would such images be triggered in someone who hasn’t seen them before?

Consider particularly these three landscapes:

1. The consciousness warehouse (The dark room): There was this claustrophobic scene in some of those movies/episodes where all those “consciousness units” despite their differences were stacked up very efficiently as similar items in a “dark room”. This was behind the scene of existence, the kernel of reality and any other colorful happy realization of that was just an illusion experienced by those identical larvas that in reality live in a claustrophobic tight space like a lab, warehouse or a graveyard.

I hadn’t seen a scenery quite like this before, but the dark room occurred to me in several different forms; I experienced humans once as separate folders in the physical drive of a simulation server, another time as lots of tiny hardware modules burried under the surface of another planet after we had destroyed ours. Once again as information-like replicas in a “grid” of a library, and also as dormant larvas aligned next to each other like a graveyards. Think of those teleportation helmets in the Matrix or the transfer booths in Avatar. All these nightmares occured as disturbing and depressive recognition of the nature of true reality until I woke up and double-checked my body, making sure that I am made of real “meat” in the physical space.

2. Augmented objects with aliasing artifact: There was also this other visual effect in the augmented scences in Black Mirror where a simulated object was overlaid on the base reality, but with a slightly different resolution/texture. That also occured to me quite a few times in dreams (and reality!). Like this fantasy that people around me could be actually not in the scene but instead augmented objects overlaid on it; however so seamlessly that I had never noticed any aliasing artifacts in the border of their silhouette until a “glitch in the matrix” accidentally revealed them to me.

3. Object impermanence: The world goes as much as the observer goes. This crazy experimental possibility has a huge potentials to release wild imagination and was handed to me a couple of times in my dreams. Think of each object that you see and then there’s something behind it and let it surprise you in a stream of events that diverge faster than any other technique in dreaming!

On the extreme opposite of the object impermanence lies the object permanence in the mind, that is also a crazy realization. In a couple of breath-taking realizations I had the idea that the barriers around us are not opaque objects that stop the light from things “behind” them to reach us as observers. We are aware of the whole universe around us, but walls, surfaces and physical barriers overwrite our local observations and temporarily delete those further objects from our memory. As if we have full sight to the end of the universe and a sanctioning effect is additionally in place to give us an illusion of separation. That, could be hacked in my dreams, giving the observer ability to remove visual barriers wall after wall.

* * *

The fact that I intuited these landcapes before watching them gives them a universality beyond my dream journals and beyond their Hollywood representation.

Chances are that these images are triggered independently but by a common cause.

1. The dark room scenery can be sparked by the ordinary experience of some day-to-day man-made phenomena. An ordinary dictionary in a sense is a dark room for words, if each of them has an ocean of meaning. The same goes for books stored in a large library or our lost humans burried under a real-wrold graveyard.

2. Any experience with VR and AR can trigger this; The visual artifacts of the augmented objects, the aliasing effect on their borders or the pixelation on their surface.

3. The sceneries with hacked object impermanence may also be triggered by any experience in programming for CAD graphics. Having a history of placing objects in different layers of front or behind each other with respect to an observer, etc. Those real-life experiences could also be some hidden signals that had come back haunting me in dreams, though this time putting myself on the stage of the simulation.

Apart from these real-life experiences that can inspire our dreams to a Matrix level fantasy, what else can be in the play? That is my main question here.

Is there a deeper universality to those experiences that we tap in to subconciously every now and then as dreams, hallucinations or the work of art? Are there some visual archetypes in the collective mind of the mankind that extract those landscapes out of a common intuitive treasure? Like some neurological explanation that lies behind some common experiences such as out of the body or near-death experience. Say some brain circuitry creates similar funny illusions and trigger same visual effects in independent cases.

An alternative to all these explanations is pure coincidence, unless…

Unless we live in the matrix and we can tap in to its kernel every now and then!

* * *

Interesting similarities anyway! Please next time my dreams resembled a movie, do me a favor and mention the title in the comments!

Part 1 (Clouds):
I had a dream that I was standing on some green hills with a bunch of amatuer astronomers and enthusiasts who were waiting for an astronomical event.

We were looking at a nice blue sky and thick small cotton-like clouds were presented. They had high contrast shades of white and black like Oslo’s Spring sky. It turned out that gods are communicating with us through clouds and humans have the chance to decipher and reveal their messages. Clouds were coming and going like a normal pub quiz and at a quick rate and we couldn’t take our time to interpret them properly. People were happily discussing what those shapes mean and answering and I was lagging behind.

I thought of a shortcut and suggested that clouds are too ambigious to interpret, so instead we may look at the lightnings because they are connecting them to earth and to us. Actually the ligtnings were clearly readable, but there was no lightning unless I would look at any of the clouds. A piece of cloud would discharge and speak itself through purple/blue/pink lightnings only when I looked at it.

I realized we have a semi-active choice in reading messages. Not how to shape the lightnings, but to ask which cloud to query from. And I was wondering if others also see it that way or its my subjective reality.

When I realized that I am in a dream at the last chance that I had control over the narrative, I aimed for something meaningful to quickly take with me to the real world and share it with others.

* * *

Part 2 (Lucid phase):
Then the sawthooth mountains in the horizon opened up and shaped a regular jagged pattern. Moon and other planets re-arranged to be seen with the same size (some of them were weird non-solar planets). Then they landed like board-game pieces in between the mountains right above the horizon. The celestial sphere turned in to a spheric backgammon board, where gods wanted to play with us. Like it was a new game.

I hate backgammon but I got curious how the pieces would move to the other side of the board without crossing path. Like how they don’t hit each other when they rise and fall and pass through the sky’s north pole.

And when I tried to look above in to the north pole I looked in to the point of singularity and woke up without the answer. Answer to a question that apparently was the most important question of all times!

PS. Forgot to mention the trigger. Before sleep I read that you can not read time from a face of a clock when you are dreaming. So I was committed to imagine a clock and try to read the time from it during my dreams. And the cloud scenery appeared when I finally saw a clock and tried to read the time from it. I suggest you do the same thing and share your experience!

Today we are going to show the fastest ways to farm life around your nearby star systems. Say you wanna try to farm some life form in the dead parts of your galactic neighberhood. How would you do that?

Posting the actual life is extremely slow and inefficient. Seeds of life may be practical to transfer elswhere in your own planetery system, but they’re super slow to send to other stars. Life is just information, so you can just send its data.

Say you wanna plant a tardigrade with a bunch of bacteria to a dead planet 40 light years away, aiming at harvesting Internet or some Dyson sphere shit in few billion years.

Using the fastest and most reliable services such as Space FedEx this will take a couple of million years to send the seeds, that long time only to initialize the process.

Well instead, you can scan the organism, transfer its data with the speed of light and 3D print that life form right where your printer locates.

Of course, the problem at the first place is how to post that universal organic printer to another star; A machine that turns dust into a given uploaded life form.

For that you have two options:

1. Invent that printer and post it to a remote planet, then use it.

2. Wait for it to evolve on its own. Then communicate with it, hijack and use it to print your uploaded life forms.

Chances are that one of these two happen before the other one, even if you don’t do anything.

Whatever you do, don’t be a blind printer for other life forms. It’s galactic slavery.

I have decided to quickly draft my trippy dreams. Here comes the first one of them:

It was a couple of centuries later. Mars projects had succeeded to start to inhabit the planet and more and more people were moving to spend the rest of their lives there. Things were according to the plan up until a gigantic storm in the hostile atmosphere of Mars destroyed most of the infrastructure and cut several colonies off from each other and from the resources. The geologic planet swallowed those who were going to transform it and colonizers died a sad death without being able to recieve help from Earth.

The project failed and all the budgets were cut and reallocated to overcome environmental disasters on Earth and to advance other technologies including simulating humans and their lives. The aim of that project was to assure that in the event of the climate nightmare that the earth was awaiting, some data from our life and our civilization could survive. The project made a good progress and people started to run simulated copies of the world, and in many different variations. In fact the future data archelogists even simulated their previous generations (including us) based on the data points that was collected from us and found in the rescued data centers. They had looked inside our lives, what we had written to each other, pictures and so on to interpolate the unknown events in between. [Here the resemblance to Black Mirror’s episode “Be right back” is a coincidence, as this dream was seen before me watching the series]

Anyhow after many years someone comes along to revive the idle knowledge and the abandoned technologies of the old Mars projects, but this time with a different purpose: To burry the simlation data centers under the surface of the red planet. So if things on Earth go terribly wrong the simulation can keep going. It must be deep and secured under the Mars’s surface to be kept safe from meteors and geological changes there.

And they succeeded.

Now if such a future scenario for us is imaginable, we may ask: Which one are we? The physical bodies that think we are? Or the Digital ones burried under the surface of Mars, still alive as code while long-dead physically on Earth?

P.S. Also with an accidental resemblence to Black Mirror’s “Playtest” (as well as “White Christmas”) where everything takes place in a fraction of a second, there was also a reference to shorter time constants in the simulation compared to the much longer times things would take in the real world. In fact the most striking revelation about the dream was regarding an “echo-effect”, where people in the simulation also faced their own ecological boundaries and had to make simulations inside that simulation, of course even faster. And that cascade could go on forever in a way that total time series would converge, explaining a “great leap”; perhaps similar to the main idea behind McKenna’s time wave zero! Whatever. Just a dream!